He smiles at Sandhya and looks away. It’s another new, mysterious habit of his. He coughs discreetly into his elbow. There’s a curtain of acrid smoke suspended in the room, drifting in from his open kitchen where the parathas were fried.

“If I could get my hands on that bloody umbilical cord, I would wrap my fingers around it and drag him back to me, just like that.”

“Who is John Galt?” someone hooted from among the seated crowd. Atlas shrugged. “Cheeky,” he said, nodding his head and smiling to himself as the joke dawned on him.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this might have been the big reveal, you know? But me, I don’t prefer gimmicks. I want my work to speak for itself, the typewritten words oozing meaning, the way my tongue seems incapable of doing.

Ping. Atlas Abdulla was rudely awakened, his vitals flashing on his retina. His head pounded as he wiped the sweat off his brow.